Image: Smoke from pipes of an electricity generating plant rises over apartment buildings in Kiev, Ukraine, November 27, 2015. REUTERS/Valentyn Ogirenko
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Germany, France and Britain pressed the European Union for more ambitious greenhouse gas targets at a meeting of environment ministers on Friday, clashing with the EU executive and several eastern and central European states.
The big states led criticism of a draft text that said the bloc does not need to revise up its targets until the next decade as it tries to decide how to share out the burden of meeting those among its 28 member countries.
So far, the EU has agreed to cut emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030 from 1990 levels and to a first global stock-take in 2023.
Germany’s Jochen Flasbarth called the European Commission text “weak on the 2030 objectives”.
In a split council, he was joined by ministers from France, Britain, Austria, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden in calling for the EU to set an example with stronger targets.
Several ministers urged an earlier stock-take to ready for a special U.N. report in 2018 to get on track for net zero emissions in the second half of the century.
However, Poland, whose economy relies on coal, and other former Soviet states said the EU should not ramp up its climate goals too soon or ahead of other nations.
Although EU policy has been set on the basis of a 2 degree limit on global warming, a U.N. climate agreement reached in Paris late last year said planet-warming needed to be capped well below that to prevent the worst effects and set an aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees.
French environment minister Segolene Royal renewed a call for Europe to lead on emissions reductions: “We went from 2 degrees to 1.5 degrees, so Europe must maintain the initiative.”
Friday’s debate was welcomed by environmental campaigners, who have hailed the wording of the EU targets as “at least” a promise for Europe to do more after other countries signed up to the U.N. accord.
“There is a wide gap between our current climate action plans and what needs to be done to avoid a climate disaster,” Wendel Trio, head of Climate Action Network Europe, said.
EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete on Friday told the dissenting ministers they were “welcome to be more ambitious” but warned that not all member states were on board for new European targets.
(Reporting by Alissa de Carbonnel and Barbara Lewis; Editing by Dale Hudson)
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